“Obviously not,” he says, and the calmness in his voice might just kill me.
“I did. I shut my laptop, I put it away, and I went to bed,” I insist. Just get it all out right now. Can't possibly get any worse than this, can it? “The next day, it was Sunday. I opened my computer to just get a little work done for the coming week. And there was that article still sitting there.”
I drop back against the couch in defeat. It all seems so stupid now—how I could even think something like that.
“I started looking for more,” I say, ashamed. “I looked deeper, and I found more.”
His eyes change then, for the first time. They sharpen in interest. “Oh? What did you find?”
“Just some more articles. Mostly in Italian. The same careful wording and the same implication. No one said anything outright, obviously, because I have to assume that libel existsin Italy, too. But it was there. Repeated enough that I couldn’t make myself stop seeing it.”
“Speculation repeated is still speculation.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?” he asks, and there is the first edge of anger in him. “Because you went alone to meet a stranger based on articles you admit were speculation.”
“I know what I did.”
“No,” he says. “I am beginning to think you did not.”
The words cut, and I deserve them.
But he deserves the rest of it.
“There was some local article,” I say. “From when you first came here. It wasn’t just old Italian gossip this time. There was a profile about you and the Hawthorne acquisition.”
His brow draws slightly. “What profile?”
“The one by Cindy Sullivan.”
Every visible part of him stills. It’s terrifying.
“The woman you supposedly met in the park,” he says.
My stomach drops.
“Yes,” I say. “That’s why I wanted to meet with her. She wrote a biography. Or a profile. Whatever you want to call it. About you, when you first acquired Hawthorne.”
“No.”
That answer deflates me.
“Wha—” I furrow my brows. “What do you mean ‘no’? Her name was on the byline, and I looked her up, found her LinkedIn—”
“No,” he says again. “There is no profile written by Cindy Sullivan.”
“Yes, there is,” I insist. “I read it, Mario.”
“I do not know which article you think you read, but no woman named Cindy Sullivan wrote a profile about me.”
“She did.”
“Victoria.” His voice lowers. “Listen to me carefully. My people keep track of every word written about me, my sons, my brothers, the family, and our businesses. Every legitimate article. Every gossip item. Every blog post with six readers and no grasp of punctuation. Anything that attaches the Conti name to print is logged.”
My fingers go cold.
“There is no profile by a Cindy Sullivan,” he says. “In fact, I'm not sure what numerous articles you’re referring to from Italy either. There are a couple of them, yes. What you Americans refer to as gossip rags. But beyond that, nothing else has anything but the official statement regarding Anna's death.”
